Influences of Geographic Environment / On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography

The mean elevation of the continents above sea level indicates the average life conditions of their populations as dependent upon relief. The 1010 meters (3313 feet) of Asia indicate its predominant highland character. The 330 meters (1080 feet) representing the average height of Europe, and the 310 meters (1016 feet) of Australia indicate the preponderance of lowlands. Nevertheless, anthropo-geography rarely lends itself to a mathematical statement of physical conditions. Such a statement only obscures the facts. The 660 meters (2164 feet) mean elevation of Africa indicates a relief higher than Europe, but gives no hint of the plateau character of the Dark Continent, in which lowlands and mountains are practically negligible features; while the almost identical figure (650 meters or 2133 feet) for both North and South America is the average derived from extensive lowlands in close juxtaposition to high plateaus capped by lofty mountain ranges. Such mathematical generalizations indicate the general mass of the continental upheaval, but not the way this mass is divided into low and high reliefs.1026

The method of anthropo-geography is essentially analytical, and therefore finds little use for general orometric statements, which may be valuable to the science of geo-morphology with its radically different standpoint. For instance, geo-morphology may calculate from all the dips and gaps in the crest of a mountain range the average height of its passes, Anthropo-geography, on the other hand, distinguishes between the various passes according as they open lines of greater or less resistance to the historical movement across the mountain barriers. It finds that one deep breach in the mountain wall, like the Mohawk Depression1027 and Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian system,1028 Truckee Pass in the Sierra Nevada1029 and the Brenner in the Alps,1030 has more far-reaching and persistent historical consequences than a dozen high-laid passes that only notch the crest. Pack-trail, road and railroad seek the former, avoid the latter; one draws from a wide radius, while the other serves a restricted local need. Therefore anthropo-geography, instead of clumping the passes, sorts them out, and notes different relations in each.

In continents and countries the anthropo-geographer looks to see not what reliefs are present, but how they are distributed; whether highlands and lowlands appear in unbroken masses as in Asia, or alternate in close succession as in western Europe; whether the transition from one to the other is abrupt as in western South America, or gradual as in the United States. A simple and massive land structure lends the same trait of the simple and massive to every kind of historical movement, because it collects the people into large groups and starts them moving in broad streams, as it were. This fact explains the historical preponderance of lowland peoples and especially of steppe nomads over the small, scattered groups inhabiting isolated mountain valleys. The island of Great Britain illustrates the same principle on a small scale in the turbid, dismembered history of independent Scotland, with its Highlanders and Lowlanders, its tribes and clans separated by mountains, gorges, straits, and fiords,1031 in contrast to the smoother, unified course of history in the more uniform England. Carl Ritter compares the dull uniformity of historical development and relief in Africa with the variegated assemblage of highlands and lowlands, nations and peoples, primitive societies and civilized states in the more stimulating environment of Asia.1032

The level or undulating surface of extensive lowlands is not favorable to the early development of civilization. Not only do their wide extent and absence of barriers postpone the transition from nomadism to sedentary life, but their lack of contrasting environments and contrasted developments, which supplement and stimulate, puts chains upon progress. A flat, monotonous relief produces a monotonous existence, necessarily one-sided, needing a complement in upland or mountain. To the pioneer settlers in the lowlands of Missouri the Ozark Plateau was a boon, because its streams furnished water-power for much needed saw and flour mills. Treeless Egypt even before 2500 B. C. depended upon the cedars of the Lebanon Mountains for the construction of its ships; so that the conquest of Lebanon, begun by Thutmose I. and completed by Thutmose III. in about 1470 B. C., had a sound geographical basis.1033 Similarly the exploitation of the copper, malachite, turquoise and lapis-lazuli of Mount Sinai, minerals not found in the Nile plain, led the ancient Egyptians into extensive mining operations there before 3000 B. C., and resulted in the establishment of Egyptian political supremacy in 2900 B. C., as a measure to protect the mines against the depredations of the neighboring Bedouin tribes.1034 Lowlands lack the distinctive advantages of highlands found in diversity of climate, water-power, generally in more abundant forests and minerals. The latter are earlier discovered and worked in the tilted strata of mountains and uplands.

Plain countries suffer particularly from a paucity of varied geographic conditions and of resulting contrasts in their population. Their national characters tend to be less richly endowed; their possibilities for development are blighted or retarded, because even racial differences are rapidly obliterated in the uniform geographic environment, A small diversified country like Crete, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, Saxony, or Japan, is a geographical multum in parvo. The western half of Europe bears the same stamp, endowing each country and nation with marked individuality born of partial isolation and a varied combination of environment. The larger eastern half of the continent embraced in the plains of Poland and Russia shows monotony in every aspect of human life. This comes out anthropologically in the striking similarity of head-form found everywhere north and east of the Carpathian Mountains, except in the secluded districts of Lithuania and Crimea, which shelter remnants of distinct races. Over all this vast territory the range of cephalic variation is only five units or one-third that in the restricted but diversified territory of western Europe. Italy, only one-eighteenth the size of European Russia, has a range of fifteen units, reflecting in the variety of its human types the diversity of its environment.1035

In the plains geography makes for fusion. Russia shows this marked homogeneity, despite a motley collection of race ingredients which have entered into the make-up of the Russian people. Without boundary or barrier, the country has stood wide open to invasion; but the intruders found no secluded corners where they could entrench themselves and preserve their national individuality.1036 They dropped into a vast melting-pot, which has succeeded in amalgamating the most diverse elements. The long-drawn Baltic-North Sea plain of Europe shows the same power to fuse. Here is found a prevailing blond, long-headed stock from the Gulf of Finland to the Somme River in France.1037 Yet this natural boulevard has been a passway for races. Prehistoric evidences show that the dark, broad-headed Celtic folk once overspread this plain east to the Weser;1038 it still tends to trickle down from the southern uplands into the Baltic lowland, and modify the Teutonic type along its southern margin throughout Germany.1039 The Slavs in historic times reached as far west as the Weser, while the expansion of the Teutons has embraced the whole maritime plain from Brittany to the Finnish Gulf. Here it is difficult to draw an ethnic boundary on the basis of physical differences. The eastern Prussians are Slavonized Teutons, and the adjacent Poles seem to be Teutonized Slavs, while the purest type of Letto-Lithuanian at the eastern corner of the Baltic coast approximates closely to the Anglo-Saxon type which sprang from the western corner.1040 A similar amalgamation of races and peoples has taken place in the lowlands of England and Scotland, while diversity still lingers in the highlands. In the Lowlands of Scotland, Picts in small numbers, Britons, Scots from Ireland, Angles, Frisians, Northmen and Danes have all been blended and assimilated in habits, customs and speech.1041

This uniformity is advantageous to early development in a small plain, because of the juxtaposition of contrasted environments, but is stultifying to national life in an immense expanse of monotony like that of Russia. Here sameness leaves its stamp on everything. Language is differentiated with only two dialects, that of the Great Russians of the north and the Little Russians of the southern steppes, who were so long exposed to Tartar influences. Most other languages of Europe, though confined to much smaller areas, show far greater diversity.1042 While the Russian of Kazan or Archangel can converse readily with the citizen of Riga or St. Petersburg, Germans from highland Bavaria and Swabia are scarcely intelligible to Prussian and Mecklenberger. And whereas Germany a few decades ago could count over a hundred different kinds of national dress or Tracht, Great Russia alone, with six times the area, had only a single type with perhaps a dozen slight variations. Leroy-Beaulieu comments upon this eternal sameness. "The cities are all alike; so are the peasants, in looks, habits, in mode of life. In no country do people resemble one another more; no other country is so free from political complexity, those oppositions in type and character, which even yet we encounter in Italy and Spain, in France and Germany. The nation is made in the likeness of the country; it shows the same unity, we might say the same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells."

The more flat and featureless a lowland is, the more important become even the slightest surface irregularities which can draw faint dividing lines among the population. Here a gentle land-swell, river, lake, forest, or water-soaked moor serves as boundary. Especially apparent is the differentiating influence of difference of soils. Gravel and alluvium, sand and clay, chalk and more recent marine sediments, emphasize small geographical differences throughout the North German lowland and its extension through Belgium and Holland; here various soils differentiate the distribution of population. In the Netherlands we find the Frisian element of the Dutch people inhabiting chiefly the clay soils and low fens of the west and northwest, the Saxon in the diluvial tracts of the east, and the Frankish in the river clays and diluvium of the south. All the types have maintained their differences of dialect, styles of houses, racial character, dress and custom.1043 The only distinctive region in the great western lowland of France, which comprises over half of the country, is Brittany, individualized in its people and history by its peninsula form, its remote western location, and its infertile soil of primary rocks. Within the sedimentary trough of the Paris Basin, a slight Cretacean platform like the meadow land of Perche1044 (200 to 300 meters elevation) introduces an area of thin population devoted to horse and cattle raising in close proximity to the teeming urban life of Paris. The eastern lowland of England also can be differentiated economically and historically chiefly according to differences of underlying rocks, Carboniferous, Triassic, Jurassic, chalk, boulder clays, and alluvium, which also coincide often with slight variations of relief.1045 In Russia the contrast between the glaciated surface of the north and the Black Mould belt of the south makes the only natural divisions of that vast country, unless we distinguish also the arid southeastern steppes on the basis of a purely climatic difference. [See map page 484.]

The broad coastal plain of our South Atlantic States contains only low reliefs; but it is diversified by several soil belts, which exert a definite control over the industries of the inhabitants, and thereby over the distribution of the negro population. In Georgia, for instance, the rich alluvial soil of the swampy coast is devoted to the culture of rice and sea-island cotton, and contains over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population. This belt, which is only 25 miles wide, is succeeded inland by a broader zone of sandy pine barrens, where the proportion of negroes drops to only 20 or 30 per cent. of the total. Yet further inland is another fertile belt, devoted chiefly to the cultivation of upland cotton and harboring from 35 to over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population.1046 Alabama shows a similar stratification of soils and population from north to south over its level surface. Along the northern border of the state the cereal belt coincides with the deep calcareous soil of the Tennessee River Valley, where negroes constitute from 35 to 60 per cent. of the inhabitants. Next comes the mineral belt, covering the low foot-hills of the Appalachian Mountains. It contains the densest population of the state, less than 17 per cent. of which is negro. South of this is the broad cotton belt of various rich soils, chiefly deep black loam of the river bottoms, which stretches east and west across the state and includes over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population. This is succeeded by the low, coastal timber belt, marked by a decline in the quality of the soil and the proportion of negro inhabitants.1047

In the dead level of extensive plains even slight elevations are seized upon for special uses, or acquire peculiar significance. The Kurgans or burial mounds of the prehistoric inhabitants of Russia, often twenty to fifty feet high, serve to-day as watch-towers for herdsmen tending their flocks.1048 Similarly the Bou-bous, inhabiting the flat grasslands of the French Congo between the Shari and Ubangui Rivers, use the low knolls dotted over their country, probably old ant-hills, as lookout points against raiders.1049 The sand hills and ridges which border the southern edges of the North German lowland form districts sharply contrasted to the swampy, wooded depressions of the old deserted river valleys just to the north. Early occupied by a German stock, they furnished the first German colonists to displace the primitive Slav population surviving in those unattractive, inaccessible regions, as seen in the Spreewald near Kottbus to-day.

The boundless horizon which is unfavorable to a nascent people endows them in their belated maturity with the power of mastering large areas. Political expansion is the dominant characteristic of the peoples of the plains. Haxthausen observed that handicapped and retarded Russia commands every geographic condition and national trait necessary for virile and expansive political power.1050 Muscovite expansion eastward across the lowlands of Europe and Asia is paralleled by the rapid spread of American settlement and dominion across the plains and prairies of the Mississippi Valley, and Hungarian domination of the wide Danubian levels from the foot-hills of the Austrian Alps to the far Carpathian watershed. It was the closely linked lowlands of the Seine and Loire which formed the core of political expansion and centralization in France. Nearly the whole northern lowland of Germany has been gradually absorbed by the kingdom of Prussia, which now comprises in its territory almost two-thirds of the total area of the Empire. Prussian statesmen formulated the policy of German unification and colonial expansion, and to Prussia fell the hereditary headship of the Empire.

Lowland states tend to stretch out and out to boundaries which depend more upon the reach of the central authority than upon physical features. We have seen American settlement and dominion overleap one natural boundary after another between the Mississippi River and the Pacific, from 1804 to 1848. Russia in an equally short period has pushed forward its Asiatic frontier at a dozen points, despite all barriers of desert and mountain. Argentina, blessed with extensive plains, fertile soil and temperate climate, which have served to augment its population both by natural increase and steady immigration (one-fourth of its population is foreign), has expanded across the Rio Negro over the grasslands of the Patagonian plain, and thereby enlarged its area by 259,620 square miles since 1881. The statesman of the plains is a nature-made imperialist; he nurses wide territorial policies and draws his frontiers for the future. To him a "far-flung battle line" is significant only as a means to secure a far-flung boundary line.

The grasslands of the old world developed historical importance only after the domestication of cattle, sheep, goats, asses, horses, camels and yaks. This step in progress resulted in the evolution of peoples who renounced the precarious subsistence of the chase and escaped the drudgery of agriculture, to devote themselves to pastoral life. It was possible only where domesticable animals were present, and where the intelligence of the native or the peculiar pressure exerted by environment suggested the change from a natural to an artificial basis of subsistence. Australia lacked the type of animal. Though North America had the reindeer and buffalo, and South America the guanaco, llama and alpaca, only the last two were domesticated in the Andean highlands; but as these were restricted to altitudes from 10,000 to 14,000 feet, where pasturage was limited, stock raising in primitive South America was merely an adjunct to the sedentary agriculture of the high intermontane valleys, and never became the basis for pastoral nomadism on the grassy plains. However, when the Spaniards introduced horses and cattle into South America, the Indians and half-breeds of the llanos and pampas became regular pastoral nomads, known as llaneros and gauchos. They are a race of horsemen, wielding javelin and lasso and bola, living on meat, often on horse-flesh like the ancient Huns, dwelling in leather tents made on a cane framework, like those of the modern Kirghis and medieval Tartars, dressed in cloaks of horsehide sewn together, and raiding the Argentinian frontier of white settlement for horses, sheep and cattle, with the true marauding instinct of all nomads.1051

Aridity is not the only climatic condition condemning a people to nomadic life. Excessive cold, producing the tundra wastes of the far north, has the same effect. Therefore, throughout Arctic Eurasia, from the Lapp district of Norway to the Inland Chukches of eastern Siberia, we have a succession of Hyperborean peoples pasturing their herds of reindeer over the moss and lichen tundra, and supplementing their food supply with hunting and fishing. The reindeer Chukches once confined themselves to their peninsula, so long as the grazing grounds were unexhausted; but they now range as far west as Yakutsk on the Lena River, The Orochones of the Kolima River district in eastern Siberia, who live chiefly by their reindeer, have small herds. A well-to-do person will have 40 to 100 animals, and the wealthiest only 700, while the Chukches with herds of 10,000 often seek the pasture of the Kolima tundra.1052 Farther west, the Samoyedes of northern Siberia and Russia and the Zirians of the Petchora River range with their large herds northward to the Yalmal Peninsula and Vaygats Isle in summer, and southward in winter. [See map pages 103, 225.] Here a herd of fifty head, which just suffices for the support of one family of four souls, requires 10 square versts, or 4.44 square miles of tundra pasturage.1053 Hence population must forever remain too sparse ever to attain historical significance. [See map page 8.] The Russian Lapps, too, lead a semi-nomadic life. Each group has a particular summer and winter settlement. The winter village is located usually inland in the Kola Peninsula, where the forests lend shelter to the herds, and the summer one near the tundra of the coast, where fishing is accessible. In winter, like the nomads of the deserts, they add to their slender income by the transport of goods by their reindeer and by service at the post stations.1054

These nomads of the frozen north, scattered sparsely over the remote periphery of the habitable world, have lacked the historical importance which in all times has attached to the steppe nomads, owing to their central location. The broad belt of deserts and grasslands which crosses the old world diagonally between 10° and 60° North Latitude from the Atlantic in Africa to the Pacific in Asia, either borders or encompasses the old domains of culture found in river oases, alluvial lowlands or coastal plains of the Torrid and Temperate Zones. The restless, mobile, unbound shepherds of the arid lands have never long been contained by the country which bred them. They have constantly encroached upon the territory of their better placed neighbors, invading, conquering, appropriating their fields and cities, disturbing but at the same time acquiring their culture, lording it over the passive agriculturists, and at the same time putting iron into their weaker blood. It is the geographical contact between arid steppes and moist river valley, between land of poverty and land of plenty, that has made the history of the two inseparable.1055

Every aspect of human life in the steppes bears the stamp of mobility. The nomad tolerates no clog upon his movements. His dwelling is the tent of skin or felt as among Kalmucks and Kirghis, or the tent wagon of the modern Boer1056 and the ancient Scythian as described by Herodotus.1057 "This device has been contrived by them as the country is fit for it," he says,—level, grassy, treeless. The temporary settlement of shepherd tribes is the group of tents, or the ancient carrago camp of the nomadic Visigoths,1058 or the laager of the pastoral Boers, both a circular barricade or corral of wagons.

Constant movement reduces the impedimenta to a minimum. The Orochones, a Tunguse nomadic tribe of eastern Siberia, have no furniture in their tents, and keep their meager supply of clothing and utensils neatly packed on sledges, as if to start at a moment's notice.1059 The only desirable form of capital is that which transports itself, namely, flocks and herds. Beyond that, wealth is limited to strictly portable forms, preferably silver, gold and jewels. It was in terms of these, besides their herds, that the riches of Abraham and Lot were rated in the Bible. That the Israelites when traveling through the wilderness should have had the gold to make the golden calf accords strictly with the verisimilitude of pastoral life.1060 Moreover, that these enslaved descendants of the Sheik Abraham, with their traditions of pastoral life, should have simply trekked-ruptured the frail ties of recently acquired habit which bound them to the Nile soil, is also in keeping with their inborn nomadic spirit. Similar instances occur among modern peoples. The Great Trek of the South African Boers in 1836, by which they renounced not only their unwelcome allegiance to England, but also their land,1061 was another exodus in accordance with the instinct of a pastoral people. They adopted no strange or difficult course, but traveled with their families as they were wont in their every day life of cattle-tenders, took all their chattels with them, and headed for the thin pastures of the far-reaching veldt. The Russian government has had to contend with a like fluidity in her Cossack tribes of the steppes, who have been up and off when imperial authority became oppressive. In the summer of 1878 West Siberia lost about 9000 Kirghis, who left the province Semipalatinsk to seek Mongolia.

Environment determines the nomadic habits of the dweller of desert and steppe. The distribution of pasture and water fixes the scope and the rate of his wandering; these in turn depend upon geographic conditions and vary with the season. The Papago Indians of southern Arizona range with their cattle over a territory 100 by 150 miles in extent, and wander across the border into Mexico. When their main water supply, derived from wells or artificial reservoirs near their summer villages, is exhausted, they migrate to the water-holes, springs or streams in the cañons. There the cattle graze out on the plains and return to the cañons to drink.1062 Every Mongol tribe and clan has its seasonal migration. In winter the heavier precipitation and fuller streams enable them to collect in considerable groups in protected valleys; but the dry summer disperses them over the widest area possible, in order to utilize every water-hole and grass spot. The hotter regions of the plains are abandoned in summer for highlands, where the short period of warmth yields temporary pastures and where alone water can be found. The Kirghis of Russian Turkestan resort in summer to the slopes and high valleys of the Altai Mountains, where their auls or tent villages may be seen surrounded by big flocks of sheep, goats, camels, horses and cattle.1063 The Pamir in the warm months is the gathering place for the nomads of Central Asia. The naked desert of Arabia yields a rare herbage during the rainy season, when the Bedouin tribes resort to it for pasturage;1064 but during the succeeding drought they scatter to the hills of Yemen, Syria and Palestine,1065 or migrate to the valley of the Nile and Euphrates.1066 The Arabs of the northern Sahara, followed by small flocks of sheep and goats, vibrate between the summer pastures on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains and the scant, wiry grass tufts found in winter on the borders of the desert.1067 When the equatorial rains begin in June, the Arabs of the Atbara River follow them north-westward into the Nubian desert, and let their camel herds graze on the delicate grass which the moisture has conjured up from the sandy soil. The country about Cassala, which is flooded during the monsoon rains by the rivers from the Abyssinian Mountains, is reserved for the dry season.1068 In the same way the Tartar tribes of the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural Rivers in the thirteenth century moved down these rivers in winter to the sea coast, and in summer up-stream to the hills and mountains.1069 So for the past hundred years the Boers of the South African grasslands have migrated in their tent wagons from the higher to the lower pastures, according to the season of the year, invading even the Karroo Desert after the short summer rains.1070

The nomad's basis of life is at best precarious. He and want are familiar friends. A pest among his herds, diminished pasturage, failing wells, all bring him face to face with famine, and drive him to robbery and pillage.1071 Marauding tendencies are ingrained in all dwellers of the deserts and steppes.1072 Since the days of Job, the Bedouins of Arabia have been a race of marauders; they have reduced robbery to a system. Predatory excursions figure conspicuously in the history of all the tribes. Robber is a title of honor.1073 Pliny said that the Arabs were equally addicted to theft and trade. They pillaged caravans and held them for ransom, or gave them safe conduct across the desert for a price. Formerly the Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes levied on the bordering districts, notably the northern part of Khorasan, which belonged more to the Turkomans, Yomut and Goklan tribes of the adjoining steppe than to the resident Persians. The border districts of Herat, Khiva, Merv and Bukhara used to suffer in the same way from the raids of the Tekkes, till the Russians checked the evil.1074 The Tekkes had depopulated whole districts, invaded Persian towns of considerable size, and carried off countless families into slavery. Both Turkomans and Kirghis tribes prior to 1873 raided caravans and carried off the travelers to the slave markets of Bukhara and Samarkand.1075 [See map page 103.]

Among these tribes no young man commanded respect in his community till he had participated in a baranta or cattle-raising.1076 For centuries the nomadic hordes of the Russian steppes systematically pillaged the peaceful agricultural Slavs, who were threatening to encroach upon their pasture lands. The sudden, swift descent and swift retreat of the mounted marauders with the booty into the pathless grasslands, whither pursuit was dangerous, their tendency to rob and conquer but never to colonize, involved Russia in a long struggle, which ceased only with the extension of Muscovite dominion over the steppes.1077